As Biden prepares for climate summit, U.N. says the world is 'on the verge of the abyss'
Just days before President Biden kicks off a climate summit with world leaders, the United Nations World Meteorological Organization released a report Monday warning that “time is fast running out” to keep global temperatures in check.
Titled “State of the Global Climate 2020,” the report finds that concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere continued to climb in 2020, despite lockdowns imposed to slow the spread of COVID-19.
Last year, the report notes, was the third warmest on record, worsening the melting of glaciers and sea ice, the acidification of the world’s oceans and the severity of wildfires and hurricanes.
A key goal of the Paris Agreement on climate change is to keep global temperatures from rising above 1.5 degrees Celsius, and the U.N. report warns that doing so will require a massive effort from the governments of the world.
“The data in this report show that the global mean temperature for 2020 was around 1.2 degrees Celsius warmer than pre-industrial times, meaning that time is fast running out to meet the goals of the Paris Agreement,” U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres said in a foreword to the report. “We need to do more, and faster, now.”
In an interview with Reuters, Guterres was even more direct, saying, “We are on the verge of the abyss.”
... With greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide and methane continuing to build up in the Earth’s atmosphere, the planet has begun to experience the ravages of climate change predicted for decades. Sea levels continue to rise as polar ice caps and glaciers continue to melt. In the U.S. in 2020, wildfires set records, as did the number of hurricanes making landfall. Heat waves on land, as well as in the oceans, increasingly threaten life on Earth. If a concerted global effort isn’t mounted to bend the current trend line, an estimated one-third of all plants and animals on the planet will be at risk of mass extinction in the next 50 years, according to a 2020 study conducted by the University of Arizona....
“The worst risk is that we don’t reach 1.5 degrees as a limit, that we go over it, and that we precipitate the world into a catastrophic situation,” Guterres told Reuters.
But the World Meteorological Organization itself acknowledged last year that keeping temperatures below the 1.5 degree threshold was increasingly unlikely. A report it issued in July stated that there was a 20 percent chance the world could see global average yearly temperatures rise above that mark in the next five years.
I never liked the idea of emissions trading - too easy to manipulate and corrupt. However, I support increased carbon pricing, perhaps even made revenue neutral by reducing other taxes. Why not make the carbon price approach its true costs, and why not include the free market in emissions solutions?
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